Joe Kenehan Center

"Everyone Knew What He Meant:" Wal-Mart's Long Campaign Against Workplace Freedom

Without meaning to, conservative journalist Kathryn Jean Lopez has written a piece that gives a clear picture of how Wal-Mart—which more and more has the market power to control prices and wages in the service sector—works hard every day to make sure its employees don’t form a union.

In her article, written for the right-wing Capital Research Center, Lopez obviously meant to do the opposite. Her intention is to show that Wal-Mart is a great company that’s unfairly getting a bad rap from unions and feminists.

More than that, Lopez tries very hard construct a picture of a Wal-Mart that isn’t actually anti-union and shouldn't be blamed if its employees decide they don't want to form a union.

But when you actually read what Lopez reports, it’s clear that Wal-Mart has no interest whatsoever it letting employees have a free decision about organizing unions.

In reality, the company works tirelessly to sow fear among its staffers and leave them with little doubt that their lives will become much more difficult should they try to organize.

As Lopez herself reminds readers, the late Sam Walton started the fight against pro-union workers: “Walton treated unions as a threat because he believed collective bargaining for employee wages and benefits would only increase his costs and disrupt employee relations. He insisted that he would close stores before he let unions organize them . . . In the 1980s a union organizing drive at a Wal-Mart distribution center in Searcy, Arkansas, was defeated after Walton threatened to end its profit-sharing plan and replace workers with new job applicants.”

Lopez decides that today there is still “little employee sentiment for unions,” based on an interview with one anonymous Wal-Mart employee. But that interview is especially telling.

Lopez’ unknown Wal-Mart worker confirms that, starting with at his initial orientation, Wal-Mart began its anti-union indoctrination:

“[The Wal-Mart manager] explained why [unions] were bad—everyone stays at the same level, you’re not rewarded for hard work, so on—and said in a rather ominous tone that the company doesn’t ‘appreciate’ people who try to bring unions into the store. Everyone knew what he meant. To come flat-out and say that people would lose their jobs for it is, I think, illegal.”

He’s right. It would technically be illegal to threaten to fire people who try to organize a union. So Wal-Mart “legally” makes the same exact threat, in a way that’s just as effective. New workers get the message on their first day that they stand a good chance of getting fired if they help support a union.

This is hardly fosters the kind of environment where employees’ “true sentiments” are allowed into the open.

But in the face of this steady opposition, some bold groups of Wal-Mart workers are trying to make changes, with some small successes. Lopez reports that:

In June, Wal-Mart settled with an Orlando cashier who was fired and filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. The settlement was for only $7,000, but union officials think it augurs well for future actions. Then in July the Arkansas Supreme Court overturned a circuit-court judge’s order that let Wal-Mart ban UFCW organizers from soliciting workers on Wal-Mart property.

Even so, Wal-Mart’s flowery rhetoric about its commitment to listening to employees’ concerns and ideas simply gets tossed aside whenever its workers have successfully organized a union. Then, Wal-Mart just decides not to deal to the union.

As Lopez recounts, “[w]orkers at an Ontario, Canada store organized a union in 1997, but Wal-Mart refused to recognize it. Meat cutters in a Texas Wal-Mart store tried to organize a union in 2000, but their jobs were eliminated when the store decided to sell precut meat. Wal-Mart is now appealing a July NLRB ruling that says it must bargain with the meat-cutters union.”

(The NLRB ruled that Wal-Mart’s decision to “sell precut meat” was really a decision to fire people who formed a union.)

The headline for Lopez' article crows that campaigns for form a union at Wal-Mart “have little chance of success.”

The content of her article spells out how an anti-union corporation— unconcerned with feeble labor laws that fail to protect workers’ rights to form unions—is able to rig the system to ensure that chances are stacked formidably against working Americans.

Protect Your Overtime Rights

If you haven't written your member of Congress about the need to block Bush's attempt to water down federal overtime rights, it only takes a minute. The House is expected to vote on Wednesday, October 1.

Socializing Privatization

It's nearly lost in a blizzard of posts on Karl Rove's possible turn as Philip Agee, but don't miss this post from Joshua Micah Marshall.

The Florida public employee pension fund -- chaired by Jeb Bush -- is buying up all of the slumping stock of Edison Corporation, the great hope of the public school privatization movement.

Edison has not lived up to its promises, either to students or investors, so Jeb Bush is bailing it out. In a sense, Florida public employees are being asked to socialize a company that was supposed to lead the way to a golden age of privatizing basic public services.

Behind the Yale Victory

Kim Phillips-Fein on the why the Yale workers won.

Edwards Speaks American

Sen. John Edwards—whose presidential campaign hasn’t gained much momentum so far—raised eyebrows a few weeks ago when he finished in the top three in a informal poll among SEIU members at the union’s political action conference.

Most of the media coverage I’d read about Edwards framed his campaign as a vehicle for centrist, DLC-approved ideas. So I was surprised to hear that Edwards won over a skeptical crowd of rank-and-file union members.

Your editor listened in when Edwards held a conference call last week with a group of SEIU members from Washington State. After hearing Edwards’ mini-stump speech, it wasn’t hard to see how his economically populist message pushed him into the top three at the conference.

His talk about fighting against corporations, along with his needling of the Bush administration for putting wealth ahead of work, is heartening.

Edwards criticizes Bush and his corporate supporters by underscoring how letting them have too much power crowds out regular families’ opportunities to get ahead. In this way, his attacks sound hopeful, not shrill.

In a sense, Edwards is “Speaking American” as labor and political journalist David Kusnet wrote in 1992 in a book on political populism that’s still useful today. (Disclosure: I worked as a researcher for Kusnet on another book.) Clinton read the book and hired Kusnet to write speeches for his campaign this year. You’d never know it if you only listened to the timid wing of the Democratic Party, but economic populism was an important building block of Clinton’s defeat of Bush Sr. in 1992.

While Edwards’ chances at getting the nomination seem to be fading, the eventual Democratic nominee would be smart to remember how Edwards is talking about the anxiousness middle class families are feeling in the Bush economy.

New Freedoms for Auto Workers

As Nathan Newman has already discussed, most media coverage of the UAW settlements doesn’t seem to get the significance of taking down some of the obstacles that have been thrown up to stop non-union auto workers from uniting in the UAW.

This New York Times analysis of the settlements, for example, doesn’t mention that the auto workers won this important breakthrough.

But to get an idea of how frightening “card check” union rights are to pro-corporate special interests, check out this frantic column from James Young in the Potomac News, a paper in suburban Northern Virginia.

It’s not the most coherent essay you’ll read this week (Young somehow manages to tie union organizing to Roe v. Wade within a few spittle-flecked sentences), but it gives you an idea of how seriously anti-union activists take the issue.

Lucidity doesn’t seem to be Young’s strongest attribute as a commentator. A staff attorney with the reflexively anti-union “Right to Work” Committee, he apparently contributes a Coulteresque freakout to the News every few weeks.

Reinvigorating the Economy: What TAPPED Misses

In a roundup of advice for the Dem candidates heading into the Baltimore debate, TAPPED admonishes candidates that talking about unions “won’t cut it” because it’s hopeless to talk about preserving manufacturing jobs, and:

[B]esides, 91 percent of us out in the private sector are non-union and doubt we'll ever benefit from anything to do with organized labor, other than its electoral interventions and the workplace changes won by unions more than half a century ago.

What is the new sector that will arise and reinvigorate the American economy again? What are the candidates going to do for those of us who are non-union workers? Anybody have any ideas?

It’s a little jarring to see TAPPED so badly misunderstand what unions are fighting for.

If TAPPED doesn’t believe non-union workers “ever benefit from anything to do with organized labor” and dismisses "electoral interventions" as trivial, it needs to take a look at what’s happening in the Senate as we write.

Right now, union members are leading a massive fight to stop Bush from watering down overtime rights for workers.

(Bush/K Street want to make it much easier for employers to reclassify about 8 million people as “managers” or “supervisors” who aren’t eligible for overtime.)

Who would immediately benefit the most if Senate Democrats succeed in blocking the Bush attack on overtime?

Not union members. Most of them already have overtime rights in their contracts, and those contracts can’t be changed by the law.

So why are unions spending so much time and energy on this issue?

Obviously, if Bush succeeds, union members will face new demands for overtime cutbacks because their employers will point to competitors that are no longer required to pay overtime and insist on parity.

But there’s no doubt that all of us—union and non-union—will be worse off if this standard is pushed down by a White House and Congress beholden to corporate special interests. And non-union workers would lose more, and faster.

There are many, many examples of changes that union members have fought for (and not all of them fifty years old) that all working people benefit from.

For decades, unions have fought to expand access to affordable health care, even though union members are more likely than non-union workers to have good health benefits. Back in 1965 unions led the fight to win universal coverage for Americans over 65, even though union retirees were more likely to have health care.

Even Mickey Kaus—whose disdain for unions is as obnoxious as it is reliable—gets this:

For decades, unions have supported government programs -- e.g. OSHA -- that reduce workers' need for unions. It's one of the great mysteries for those of us with a cynical view of politics.

It shouldn’t be that much a mystery to understand that a rising tide lifts all boats, and better policies benefit all of us. It’s called solidarity, which has become too distant a concept in our country these days.

The current fight to defend overtime standards provides a good example of why progressives like TAPPED should support a stronger union movement, not pout about its supposed irrelevance.

Non-union private sector workers have the most to lose if Bush undoes the overtime standards as well as many other changes that working people fought for those fifty long years ago. Yet they aren’t fighting back, largely because they are disconnected from what’s happening in Congress.

Literally, they’re not organized, and as a result they don’t have any coherent voice to oppose an agenda that has been dictated to the White House and Congress by narrow corporate special interests.

Unions connect regular people to Congress, the president, and state and local officials in a way that matters. They get people information that spurs them to send e-mails, make calls, and most importantly, vote.

(Ruy Teixiera has pointed out in many forums that white guys in unions are just about the only working-class white men who can be counted on to vote for progressive candidates. I can only hope that TAPPED can see the importance of getting more support from white men for left-liberal candidates.)

TAPPED is very much right that we need to have a new discussion about reinvigorating the American economy, especially if TAPPED is right about manufacturing jobs not coming back. The white guys who used to have many of those jobs are still here.

But the only way working people are going to have a meaningful voice in that discussion is through their own independent organizations, which is exactly what unions are.

The problem is that it’s difficult for working people who want to have a voice in provoking that discussion to have a say, because it’s far too difficult for them to form unions.

Some of the Democratic candidates are speaking out about making it easier for non-union workers to join the discussion. TAPPED should take a second to recognize that we’ll all be better off when that happens.

Big Changes for Organizing Unions

The coalition of AFL-CIO unions that are committed to finding new, better ways to organize more workers into unions is talking about setting up a partnership independent of the AFL-CIO to push for change at a faster pace.

Here’s an interview with SEIU president Andy Stern about the plan.

Check Those Cards

In a welcome development, more people are talking about the idea of establishing “card check” rights in American workplaces.

(“Card check” is a term for a process where employees form a union by gathering signatures from a majority of their co-workers. Card check is the process that Canadian workers use to form unions.)

New York Sen. Charles Schumer has introduced a bill that would allow American employees to go this route when they want to organize a union. John Kerry has signed on as a co-sponsor and unions will urge other Democratic candidates to support labor law reform as well.

Corporate special interests are plainly terrified by the concept of reducing the red tape employees have to wade through to form a union.

Here's a good example of their nervousness: the rabidly anti-union Detroit News (a Gannett-owned paper that provoked a bitter strike by its own staff back in the late ‘90s) decided this week that it was time to editorialize against reform.

The News’ editorialists shed crocodile tears over the supposed threat to the sanctity of secret ballot elections, carefully avoiding any close look at how unfair the current secret ballot process actually is for employees. (For another take on what’s wrong with the current rules, take a look at this web comic.)

The National Right To Work committee is also mobilizing against reform.

But the most interesting point on this topic involves a guy who presumably would've been an archenemy of any move to restore workers' right to join unions.

Slate’s Timothy Noah previews William Grieder’s new book The Soul of Capitalism with the odd story of David Stockman, the supply-side ideologue who was Reagan's budget director.

Stockman has reemerged as a corporate leader who has made common cause with unions by investing with a “buy and build” strategy for mid-sized manufacturing companies. Stockman’s firm, with the backing of capital from union pension funds, has agreed not to interfere if employees at some newly-aquired companies decide to form a union.

Stockman’s decision to respect his employees’ right to organize is enough of a threat to anti-union corporate leaders that it’s prompted a panicked lawsuit from the Right to Work Committee’s legal stormtroops.